CEOs Brace for the Chaos of Another Four Years of Trump

Large corporations crave predictability, and the primary economic policy of Donald Trump is chaos. Whether it’s the threat of steep new tariffs or retribution, chief executive officers and their carefully drawn plans will once again be at the whims of a leader who’s emboldened to reorder the economy.

Trump has promised to roll back regulations, which is what companies like to hear, but as his first presidency showed, his compulsion to tear up the rules can be indiscriminate. Before Trump, modern US presidents didn’t publicly threaten to punish companies that refused to do their bidding. During his first administration, that was almost a weekly occurrence. Even if he rarely followed through, the threats were destabilizing.